I am so happy to announce that after months of planning and development, we are able to invite you to participate in a totally new The Whale Hunters website.

There’s a front-facing site designed for newcomers, to help people understand what benefits they can hope to gain for their company by engaging with The Whale Hunters products and services.  But more important is the interactive content management portal dubbed Pier9.  It’s a pier because a pier is a gathering place and a launching pad.  And it’s Pier9 for the 9-phase Whale Hunters Process™.

Here you will find a collection of The Whale Hunters articles, access (via search) to fellow whale hunters from around the world (some who probably have experience with the whale you want to pursue next), links to upcoming virtual and on-site events, news, announcements, and discussion forums.  All of that is free.

If you choose to become a premium member for a monthly or annual fee, you can have access to all of that plus our complete library of articles, podcasts, recorded Expert Series calls, the “Ask an Expert” forum, “Coach and Connect” deal coaching discussion, and access to our new monthly webinar series at no additional charge.

The Whale Hunters content covers a range of small business development issues including sales process, sales development, sales management, small business growth, how to win with an RFP, fast-growth culture and more.

I hope you will check it out and let me know what you think.  It’s brand new, so I’m sure it has some glitches here and there.  Please be so kind as to let us know so we can fix them.  I look forward to meeting you on Pier9–get there by visiting www.thewhalehunters.com and signing up for basic (free) membership.

The fourth quarter of the business year begins on the Tuesday after Labor Day.  Finally, everyone is home from vacation.  Kids are back in school.  The bookends of summer–Memorial Day and Labor Day–are now closed.  People will return your phone calls, meetings can be scheduled, and work can move on.

What business development plans do you have to ensure your 4th quarter success?

It’s not the time to rush willy-nilly into chasing whatever leads come in the door.  Rather, it’s a time to increase your discipline in identifying, pursuing, closing, and serving your next big customers.  Your sales process and sales management practices are more important now than ever.

Here are some Q4 success ideas from The Whale Hunters:

Strategy:

• Review goals for Q4 with your team.
• Be certain that everyone agrees the goals can be accomplished with proper focus.
• Manage against those goals on a weekly basis.

Scouting:

• Review your target filter and apply it ruthlessly.  Only go after business that is a very good fit for you.
• Step up your efforts to learn about whale-sized prospects and create detailed dossiers.

Hunting:

• Implement process steps and review your team’s performance against those steps.  Be in charge of your company’s sales process to ensure results.
• Propose whale-sized solutions to whale-sized problems.
• Engage your entire team in pitching business and designing solutions

Harvesting:

• Focus on providing exceptional service to your current customers.
• Celebrate your current customers and let them know that you celebrate them.

A few whale hunting process reminders to send you on your way to a strong finish for the year.  Would love to hear your favorite Q4 strategies and tactics!

One of The Whale Hunters’ new Certified Partners, Roslyn Courtney, blogs at Leadership Pundit: Success in the New Economy. Her new article Whale Hunter Leaders is about the role of small business in growing the economy and how Whale Hunting can help.

Roslyn writes,

“Early into my Whale Hunting boot camp (I’m now certified), I knew that this approach can make a dramatic difference in our struggling economy. Companies with big aspirations often lack the magical ingredients for success - the best methodology to target growth, the process, and the leadership to pursue it effectively. These companies need to create a new management strategy for business development so they can spot and land much bigger clients. They need a methodology to evaluate and seek out the companies that will be most interested in their products or services. They need specific skills to know when they have spotted a suitable whale and the best time to hunt it. They need to understand how whales think and work. They need to understand the return on the investment they will make to successfully land big accounts and continue to grow them.”

There’s more about the business development strategy known as whale hunting.

Thanks, Roz, for an insightful article about whale hunter leaders, and best wishes as you develop your Whale Hunters practice

I’m pleased to announce the next Expert Series call coming up on September 15, 9 am Pacific and 12 noon Eastern time.

This call features Greg Chapman, who is president of Sitewire, an interactive marketing firm that is now one of the parent companies of The Whale Hunters.

Greg has a very interesting perspective to share.  In his former role as Divisional Vice President – Catalog at Sears Holdings Corp, he was responsible for making the decision to hire Sitewire for Sitewire’s first “whale sized” deal as they were implementing The Whale Hunters Process™.  He will be talking about why he wanted to do business with a small company for this particular project and what he had to go through at Sears, internally, to get support for that decision.  He’ll also talk about why he chose Sitewire rather than some other smaller competitors.

Now, a few years later, Greg has landed as the president of this small company that so impressed him at Sears.  He can talk about the kind of business they are doing today–in volume and scope–and how he advises his team to prepare and engage whales.

It’s a point of view and breadth of experience that you won’t often have the chance to experience.  As always, the Expert Series Call has no registration fee, but your long distance charges may apply. And you must be registered to get the call-in information.  More information and registration are available here.

I would love to hear your feedback on the Expert Series calls that you’ve heard to date.

For a long time, I’ve been exhorting clients to be certain that the sales team is selling what the operations or implementation team plans to deliver.  In the past couple of weeks, The Whale Hunters team has been on the receiving end of that potential mismatch, which compels me to write about it again.  Here’s some context that may resonate with you as a seller (and possibly even as a buyer)!

The Setting:    Your company sells a product with a service, or a service with a product, or a customizable service or product or both.  I have seen this issue surface repeatedly in software companies, professional services companies, and advertising/marketing agencies, to name a few.

The Sale:  Let’s take software as an example.  Your company provides an enterprise software solution that requires considerable integration into your customers’ existing systems.  Your project management/account management/customer service teams believe that you are selling a product that is basically one size fits all, although it could be customized with some bells and whistles–later–when all of the initial  installation stuff is done and the system is up and running.

The Snag:  Your sales team has fallen in love with the bells and whistles.  Rather than sell the boring one-size-fits-all product, they are selling the customizable parts.  Whatever the buyers say they would like to have, the sales team promises.  In fact, the sales team leads with the extras, not the basics.

So now you are stuck.  You’ve made this sale.  The sales team celebrates.  The customer is excited about their purchase and ready for implementation.  And your implementation team is . . . . oh my goodness . . . appalled.  “We can’t do that!”  or “We don’t do this!” or “We’re just not ready for that!”

As I said, this circumstance has been brought home to me in the past few weeks.  The Whale Hunters has been working on a major build of a new website that incorporates a content management system.  We decided to go with a product geared towards educational institutions rather than corporate solutions, having been assured that the product was completely customizable.

But once the sales team handed off to the implementation team, the bubble burst.  We heard, “We can’t do that” and “They shouldn’t have told you we could do that” and “It would cost a lot more for us to do that.”  And we didn’t hear nearly soon enough about some serious deal-breaker issues that they cannot resolve.

So it’s been a very painful reminder to me that your customer is going to be very, very unhappy if just from the get-go your delivery team begins to say “they shouldn’t have promised . . . . . whatever.”

If your company has ever been in the position of a disconnect between sales and operations or implementation areas, it’s time to correct that problem now.  If you land a large account with that kind of mis-match, they can cost you a lot of money, make your employees miserable, and quite literally force you out of business if the deal is big enough to get their serious attention.

So, if you’re not positive that both sides of your house know how to collaborate on a complex sale, it’s definitely time for them to learn.

Has your company ever been in this kind of trouble?  How did you handle it?

The recording of my interview with Jill Konrath is now posted. Jill is the best-selling author of Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling. In this interview, Jill gives sage, practical advice for getting the attention of “crazy busy” corporate executives.  She is a great speaker, full of cases and details, with a fine sense of humor.  60 minutes well spent– I highly recommend it!

For a very limited time, you can still access all of the Expert Series calls on The Whale Hunters website.

In this week’s Whale Hunters Wisdom newsletter, I reviewed Jill Konrath’s newest book, SNAP Selling.

This is an inspired, practical, usefully detailed how-to guide for sellers who need to get the attention of “crazy busy” corporate executives.  Refreshingly, here’s no hype in this book.  In fact a lot of it is about ridding your sales materials and conversations of the hype that creeps in.

This edition of Whale Hunters Wisdom is online for you.

Jill Konrath

I’m pleased to announce that I will host Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling for The Whale Hunters’ “Expert Series” call, Wednesday, August 18, at 9 am Pacific, 10 am Mountain, 11 am Central, and noon Eastern time.

Jill is a seasoned sales professional who made a name for herself in corporate America and then founded her own company providing sales advice, training, and coaching and writing best-selling books from her home base in Minnesota.  Her client list is a veritable “who’s who” of large corporations including General Mills, Hilton, 3M, Medtronic, United HealthCare, AAA, and General Mills. Prior to starting her consulting firm, Jill was a highly successful sales executive, regional sales manager and product launch manager for leading technology companies.

The purpose of my interview with Jill is to discuss how the world of sales into big companies has changed and how to get the attention of “crazy-busy” executives.  You’ll get great advice from Jill on your sales process and  small business growth.

We’ll cover:

1.       How has the world of large account sales changed in recent years and what does that mean to you?

2.       What do you have to “unlearn” in order to be successful in this new environment?

3.       What strategies and tactics does Jill recommend?

4.       What are the methods that really work to accelerate your sales process?

5.       What advice does Jill have for you to be more successful in speeding up your sales process with large account prospects?

There is no registration fee to participate in this call (your long distance charges may apply).  Register now to get dial-in information for a discussion with Jill Konrath.

I hope you will join us!

I am very pleased to have a guest blog post published at Venture Beat in the Entrepreneur Corner.

It’s all about how to refocus your team.  If you have been taking whatever business comes your way in order to survive, you have changed your company culture.  To capitalize on the economic recovery, you’ll need to re-invigorate some Whale Hunting principles.

I hope you will enjoy this guest blog post on “emerging from the slump.”

I had the pleasure of presenting a Whale Hunters workshop for the Academy Plus attendees at the annual training seminar hosted by the Western Alliance of Chamber Executives, headquartered in Sacramento, CA.  These are experienced CEOs of local and regional Chambers of Commerce, dedicating time and energy to better serving their members and their communities.

There’s a lot going on in their world that is relevant to business owners and executives.  Here are a few of the key issues that they presented:

• The economy.  Members are paying closer attention to their dues and the value received.  Cost cutting is everywhere, and Chamber membership can be perceived as “nice to have but not mission critical.”
• The customer benefit equation.  Chamber execs are continually striving to deliver extra and extraordinary benefits to their members and sponsors.
• The sponsor hunt.  Many Chambers host community events for which they seek high-level sponsorship.  This process is truly a whale hunt.  Matching the potential sponsor with the event and benefits package most attractive to a sponsor is all about Target Filter, Scouting, and developing a Whale Chart.
• The community.  Chamber executives are not in total agreement about what is their role in economic development, job creation and retention, representing business interests in legislation, community-backed joint ventures, and other ventures that they are often asked to participate in and sometimes to lead.

What were the best ideas I heard?

• Be creative in new membership packages for current members who cannot renew because of costs.  Chamber execs have been very creative in packaging and offering virtual memberships, email memberships, interim memberships, and others.
• Involve past board chairs and other past leaders in a consistent, significant way, empowering them to lend their influence to others in the community.
• Reach out to Gen Y leaders and employees through social media, including texting key messages, and embrace the ways in which they prefer to receive, send, and process information.
• Take a broad view of sponsorship, beyond members.  Some organizations who have no interest in membership nevertheless have a strong interest to position in front of the Chamber members and their affiliates for a specific, relevant event.  One example cited was an event with a clear ethnic focus, which attracted sponsors who did not value the membership per se but wanted to have their name and logo in front of participants.

Key lessons here are relevant to the community of for-profit entrepreneurs and executives.

• If you are not actively engaged with your local or regional or state Chamber of Commerce, seek out the leadership and let them know exactly why you have not chosen to sign on.  Help them understand what value they could add to your enterprise and what would attract you to engage.
• If you are a member, step up to leadership so that your company and your community are powerfully positioned for economic development, job creation/retention, and reputation for business innovation and success.
• Encourage your local or regional Chamber to get involved in strategic alliances and joint ventures with related entities that have similar economic and business development goals.

How does your local or regional Chamber benefit you?  If you are not an active member, what would attract you to join?